Vivaldi was started with the promise of giving you a highly customizable, full-featured, innovative browser. It looks like its developers kept their promise - there is no other browser on the market which offers the same amount of options and features. While Vivaldi is built on Chrome's engine, power users are the target user base, like the classic Opera 12 browser. Vivaldi was created by former Opera co-founder and developed keeping in mind Opera's usability and power.

Many user interface elements and options of Vivaldi will be familiar to Opera 12 users.

Left panel with useful tools like Notes, bookmarks and download manager:

User interface scaling and default page zoom Unlike other mainstream browsers, Vivaldi comes with a native user interface zoom feature. This means you can specify any desired scaling for the browser's controls and options.

The option scales the interface of the browser but not the page content. An option in settings allows you to specify the default zoom level for opened pages:

Tab hibernation This option will allow you to purge all inactive tabs from memory and make the browser use less amount of RAM. If you have many tabs open, simply right click on the active tab and choose 'Hibernate Background Tabs'. This will immediately free up more resources as your tabs are 'put to sleep'. Switching over to any of them will bring them back to life.

Web Panels Web panels is a cool feature which allows you to track web site changes. Once you add a site into the panel, you can check its changes with one click. It is also possible to add an RSS feed there.

Informative address bar Vivaldi includes informative tips in the address bar while the page is loading. Classic Opera users might remember such info showing in the status bar.

Color schemes Vivaldi comes with the ability to change the color scheme of the browser. Currently, only light and dark themes are available, and you can still disable the active tab's coloring.

By changing these options, you can achieve a nice look:

Keyboard shortcuts Many users like to control the browser by using the keyboard. Keyboard shortcuts are time-saving and more convenient than mouse movements. Vivaldi comes with an extended shortcuts list.

Page actions Pages actions can apply various effects to the opened page, e.g. make it grayscale:

Quick Commands Quick Commands is a feature which shows a list of commands available in the browser sorted by usage frequency. Press F2 to open it. The good thing is that it also shows hotkeys assigned to a command.

The Vivaldi browser can be a real alternative to existing "simplified" browsers such as Google Chrome and its various forks, as well as Mozilla Firefox, which is also oversimplified without add-ons to supplement it. The Vivaldi team has made it their goal to take the place of the old Opera 12 browser. They also promise to implement bookmark sync and the email client.

About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.